First Lines of Pitchfork Reviews

The first lines of random Pitchfork.com reviews

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When people ask where my grandpa is from, he doesn’t name a town. 

-- Johnny Cash, American Recordings

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It’s all there in the first minute: there’s a low-mid whoosh that’s clearly guitar feedback, like a Jimi Hendrix power chord trailing off; there’s a bit of an electric rattle, perhaps a fluttering speaker cone gasping for air; then come the high-pitched screeches, perhaps bringing to mind a grainy video image of seagulls circling over an open sea filled with radioactive garbage. 

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This could have been MGMT’s last chance.

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9T Antiope, the duo of Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, hail from Tehran and live in Paris, and from the sound of this self-released EP, they may as well be time travelers, for all we know.

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Sheena was a punk rocker, but not anymore. 

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"New Atlanta," a concept propagated mostly by blogs to organize the riches of rap's constantly evolving, intimidatingly prolific capital city, entails a yearly changing of the guard.

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The tenth anniversary of Chromeo's debut album She's in Control happened a few months ago, and the fact that there were no essays or oral histories commemorating the occasion is a reminder that Dave 1 and P-Thugg have made it a decade without a widely beloved full-length—instead, they're known more for a few great singles and their winking revivalist aesthetic

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There’s a tendency in American culture to use foreign punk bands to gain insight to another nation’s political and emotional tenor, and that’s just not gonna work with Sweden’s Makthaverskan.

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Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri.

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When it comes to fucking around, Duck Sauce are not fucking around.

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It’s easy to assume that American underground didn't grasp the definining characteristics of  post-punk until the 21st century, but the truth is more complicated than that.

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Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever look toward the cosmic and the karmic, favoring set-it-and-forget-it synth jams that seem ripped from 1970s Germany; they’re scientific and mechanical in their construction, but they still imbue their work with emotion.

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The history of American underground rock in the past 25 years is as messy and hard to track as the music. #pitchfork

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Sometimes exploitative impulses yield good art. #pitchfork

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DMT users often report encounters with so-called “machine elves,” entities that exist outside of reality as we normally perceive it, manipulating events in our universe from behind the scenes without most people knowing.

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Race has long been a sore spot for speculative fiction: check the latent color consciousness of Tolkien (dark skinned orcs = savages, fair skinned elves = enlightened), the whitewashed galaxies of the early Star Wars films, and The Last Airbender, a silver screen take on a series about Asian people that somehow managed to bleach them out in casting.

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The War on Drugs’ 2011 album Slave Ambient saw perpetual unease as a Zen state: bandleader Adam Granduciel’s ruminations on restlessness read like a veritable prescription for Xanax, but the psychedelia-smeared country-rock enveloping his words was all, like, “No worries, dude.”